Quote Originally Posted by tiva View Post
We have a small farm, and I'm also a professor of wildlife and forest ecology at a huge midwestern university. Factory-farming methods are appalling--except for broiler chickens. Laying hens are abused quite horribly in factory farm conditions, but broilers are treated in factory farm conditions pretty much the same way they're treated on free-range farm (they have a huge hoop house with lots of straw bedding, and they run around in flocks until it's time to eat them. Not a bad life for a flocking creature.) So I'll buy supermarket chicken meat, but no other meat from supermarkets.
Of course, this doesn't consider the inhumane way the assembly line workers at the chicken processing plant are treated. I became a vegetarian in 1991 after reading about the limbs that were lost by the mostly immigrant workers when they were caught in the fast-moving machinery at the plants.